It seems there is a story now every week on some major hacking incident, and the latest involves Google’s Gmail. The hackers are said to have originated from China and they have tried to steal passwords of hundreds of account holders, including high profile US government officials as well as Chinese activists and journalists.

The originators of the hack seemed to be coming from Jinan, the capital of China’s eastern Shandong province according to Google.

Washington said it is looking into Googles claims while the FBI have said they are working with Google after the attacks. The hackers have tried to crack and monitor email accounts by stealing passwords, but Google has apparently detected the campaign, stopping it. Google are clearly a little more aware of security attacks than some leading companies.

Google said “We recently uncovered a campaign to collect user passwords, likely through phishing. The goal of this effort seems to have been to monitor the contents of these users’ emails. It affected what seem to be the personal Gmail accounts of hundreds of users, including among others, senior U.S. government officials, Chinese political activists, officials in several Asian countries, military personnel and journalists.”

Cyberattacks originating from China are growing in popularity and are now fairly common. Bruce Schneier chief security technology officer at telecommunications company BT told Reuters “It’s not just the Chinese government. It’s independent actors within China who are working with the tacit approval of the government.”

Kitguru says: As always, a good course of action would be to change your password.